What was PowerShell's original codename?

PowerShell’s original codename was Monad.

The name appeared publicly in the “Monad Manifesto,” a white paper published in August 2002 by Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell’s chief architect. Monad was conceived as a new command-line environment for automating Windows administration, with a design built around structured data rather than treating every command’s output as plain text.

Microsoft first demonstrated Monad publicly at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in October 2003. Its first public beta followed on June 17, 2005, with additional beta releases later that year and in early 2006. On April 25, 2006, Microsoft announced that Monad had been renamed Windows PowerShell.

The rename marked a shift from an internal project identity to a product integrated into Windows management. PowerShell 1.0 was released to the web on November 14, 2006, and was included with Windows Vista. The distractors are names associated with other Microsoft projects: Cairo was an NT-era codename, while Avalon and Indigo were codenames for parts of the Windows presentation and communications stacks.